Technology to improve the safety of driving has evolved to now include assistive technology based upon sensors built into vehicles, e.g., automobiles. Features such as lane departure warning, collision detection and blind-spot monitoring are available, based upon camera, laser and radar technology or a combination thereof.
Today such assistive technologies are not affordable and/or not widely available. For one reason, at price points typically on the order of several thousands of dollars, these technologies are typically only purchased in high-end cars. Further, car manufacturers need to build embedded systems that remain reliable for as long as the lifetime of the car. Upgrading the software or hardware of such features is rarely easy and often not practically possible.
As an alternative to such stand-alone solutions in which each vehicle fends for itself, in late 1999, the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) allocated 75 MHz of spectrum in the 5.9 GHz band for the so-called Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC) to be used by Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). The general idea was to implement safety improvements based upon inter-vehicle (v2v) or vehicle-to-infrastructure (v2i) communications, with vehicle and roadside monitors providing warnings to drivers. However, when researched, deploying dedicated roadside infrastructure has turned out to be very expensive, whereby actual implementation of this technology is unlikely to become widely available. Car manufacturers also have not adopted this technology to any noticeable extent, and any standardization across car manufacturers likely will be slow.